Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, "Enactive Sense-Making= Agent-making + Environment-Making"

On Thursday 16 June 2022, the International Centre of Enactivism and Cognitive Semiotics in collaboration with the International Center for Humanities "Umberto Eco" has organized the last event for the seminar series "Anthropocene" with Ezequiel A. Di Paolo on the enactive sense-making.

 Abstract: At the core of the worldview that have led to the current climate crisis lies a dualistic ontology that separates society and nature, subject and object, mind and body. The contemporary sciences of the mind, from neuroscience to cognitive science and AI reinforce the Cartesian dualism underpinning these dichotomies, even if on the surface these disciplines pay lip service to a materialist conception of the mind.

Is there an alternative perspective? In this presentation I will overview some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to life and mind; in particular, the ideas of unfinished nature, the dialectics of agent-environment co-determination, the fundamental concept of sense-making as care, and the historicity of human bodies.

The enactive approach proposes a non-dualistic view of life and mind that better fits our current global predicament. Through embodied activities, communities of agents co-arise with their worlds of significance in a relation of mutual co-determination. The enactive perspective attempts to do justice to the complexity of human experience, in its organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective, and linguistic dimensions, while all the time acknowledgment that the environment is a participant in the unfinished process of human becoming as much as human beings are participants in the constitution of the environment. All of life is minded, in the enactive approach, and all of sense-making is at the same time body- and environment-making.